Continuous Images of Arcs and Inverse Limit Methods

Continuous images of ordered continua have been studied intensively since 1960, when S. Mardsic showed that the classical Hahn-Mazurkiewicz theorem does not generalize in the "natural" way to the nonmetric case. In 1986, Nikiel characterized acyclic images of arcs as continua which can be approximated from within by a sequence of well-placed subsets which he called T-sets. That characterization has been used to answer a host of outstanding questions in the area. In this book, Nikiel, Tymchatyn, and Tuncali study images of arcs using T-set approximations and inverse limits with monotone bonding maps. A number of important theorems on Peano continua are extended to images of arcs. Some of the results presented here are new even in the metric case.